The Last Mortal Bond (29 page)

They were only letters—tiny and precise, dark ink on a roll of bone-white parchment—but they might as well have been barbs, every one of them lodged in Adare's chest as she read, lodged in her throat, tugging, then tearing. Nira was there, was wounded, and the guardsman's note said nothing about an infant. Nothing about Sanlitun.

Adare wanted to leap from the throne, to charge out through the huge doors, to find the woman who was supposed to be watching her son and wring the answers from her. She was the Emperor, however; there were forms to be observed. There was the whole ridiculous staircase—a one-ton piece of furniture, all dovetailed, polished teak set on silver wheels—to roll out from the shadows so that she could descend with imperial dignity. There were traditional phrases to intone, prayers to offer, then the endless fucking genuflection of the assembled ministers. Adare managed to keep her head up throughout it all, her eyes forward, her hands still at her sides. She managed to play her part, to speak the words that were hers to speak, while the same three questions carved through all other thought:

Why is Nira here?

What has gone wrong?

Where is my son?

When the great gongs finally shuddered the air and she finally walked from the Hall of a Thousand Trees, she could only hope that she looked like an emperor. She felt like a ghost.

The Sons of Flame escorted her to a small suite of rooms set into the red walls themselves just north of the Great Gate. It was a simple but elegant space, used for the entertainment of unexpected visitors, men and women of indeterminate rank or station, messengers or foreign ministers meriting a private space while more suitable arrangements could be determined. Nira sat just inside the door, slumped over a bloodwood table, ignoring both the pitcher of wine and the ewer of water glistening wetly on the polished wood.

Any other time, Adare would have been frightened for her councillor, furious. Any other time she would have been hollering for a physician, for a cot, for a change of clothes and bandages. In that moment, however, as she stood trembling just inside the door, she found all thoughts but one had been scrubbed utterly from her mind.

“Where is my son?” she asked in a voice dry as ash. “Sanlitun?
Where is he?
”

Nira grimaced. “He's alive.”

“Alive?” Adare demanded, fear driving her voice high, then higher. “
Alive?
You were watching him, protecting him, and you show up looking like … like this, and all you can tell me is that he's alive?”

The Nira Adare remembered would have bristled at that. She would have bashed Adare's knuckles with her cane, or smacked her across the side of the head. Now, she could barely manage a nod.

“He was alive when I got out. He will be still. The bastard needs him.”

“Who?”
Adare demanded. “
What
bastard?”

The woman met her eyes, and Adare felt a hole open in her gut.

“Il Tornja,” she breathed.

Nira nodded wearily. “He's got your son. Your son and my brother both.”

For a moment Adare could only stare. She watched her hands reach for a glass as though they had their own mind, watched them fill a delicate flute to the rim with wine.
He has my son.
She started to pull the glass toward her, then looked again at Nira, slumped in her chair, and passed the wine to her. The old woman gazed at it with those defeated eyes as though she'd never seen a glass before. Adare poured one for herself, then drank deep. Nira twitched, as though waking from sleep, and followed suit. When she spoke again, there was a flicker of heat in her voice. Just a flicker, then gone.

“I'm sorry, girl.”

Adare drained the glass, shook her head, then poured another. She could feel the questions pressing in, dozens of them, but couldn't bring herself to speak. Suddenly it seemed important to remain quiet, as though if she didn't ask what had happened, if Nira never answered, none of it would be real. As long as they stayed silent, it could be a dream.

When she'd drained a second glass, she placed her palms against the table, slowly, deliberately, as though the surface could hold her up. She studied the wood's grain, lingering on the delicate lines and whorls, as though she could lose herself in that imaginary topography.
Coward,
she thought grimly.
I am a coward.
Her gaze was heavy as a millstone as she hauled it back to Nira.

“Tell me.”

The woman nodded, drank her wine down in a great gulp, then nodded again.

“I should have killed him,” she said, her voice an angry ghost. “Should have killed him back in Aats-Kyl.”

“But the collar,” Adare protested. “That leash of fire. It broke?”

Nira snorted. “A thing like that doesn't break. It gets unmade.”

“But he's not a leach.”

“No. Oshi is.”

Adare stared, baffled. “Oshi hates him. Oshi would have
slaughtered
him if you told him to.”

“That was before the Csestriim started talking.” Nira shook her head bitterly. “I was a fucking fool. I thought, because I put that noose around his neck and told him to help, to fix what he had done, that he was helping, fixing. They'd sit for hours, il Tornja asking his questions: ‘What's the first thing you remember? What's the first face you remember seeing? When did you first cry? When did you first see your own blood?' Like that. Hundreds a' questions. Thousands.”

She blew out a long, unsteady breath, winced as something shifted painfully inside her, then continued.

“Seemed useless to me—all that chatter. We weren't made what we are through a bunch a' questions, and I told him that. He just smiled—you know that smile—told me that before he could fix a thing, he had to see where it was cracked. I thought he was just stalling—that it was all useless but harmless. Thought it wouldn't hurt ta wait a little longer.…”

She trailed off, but Adare could already see what happened next.

“Il Tornja turned him,” she said. “He turned your brother to his side somehow, and Oshi removed the collar.”

Nira nodded. “My poor brain-buggered brother … He barely knew the sky from the sea on a good day. One time I had to persuade him not ta go ta war with the trees. He wanted to demand fealty from the fuckin' fish. He didn't know … anything, and all the time that Csestriim bastard was at work inside his busted head, twisting history, erasing memories, replacing them with his own lies. It must have been so easy.”

“And you didn't try to stop it?”

“I didn't
know
. Not until the collar was off. Then I tried ta stop them both.” She shaded her eyes with a withered hand, as though the memory of what had happened was too bright. When she spoke again, the words were a whisper. “I woulda killed him then—my brother. I tried. But he's strong. Oshi's broken, but still so, so strong.”

She ran a hand absently over the burned stubble of her scalp, winced, then pulled her fingers away.

“He attacked
you
?”

“Yes. Maybe.” Nira paused, shook her head. “The flames were flyin'—that's sure as shit—but I can't say he recognized me.”

Nira was staring at the carafe of wine. After a moment, she took it in one withered hand and poured them both another drink.

“You used your own power,” Adare said slowly.

The old woman snorted quietly. “Ya expect me to fight one a' the world's strongest leaches with my fingernails?”

“I thought,” Adare replied, choosing her words carefully, “that you tried not to use your power. That dipping too deep and too often into his well is what drove your brother mad in the first place. That it's what drove all the Atmani mad.”

Nira stared into her wine, swirled it, then raised it to her lips as though she hadn't heard. She finished off the glass in a single pull, and then set it back on the table so carefully the crystal made no sound against the wood.

“Yeah,” she said finally, staring at the glass with rheumy eyes. “It was.”

“And?”

“And what?” Nira asked, raising her eyes to meet Adare's.

“Is that a concern now?”

Nira laughed a sharp, jagged laugh. “Ya mean, have I gone mad?”

Adare studied the old woman. Nira had been there almost from the beginning, since the day Adare fled the Dawn Palace. She was the only person in the world who knew everything.

“I need you,” Adare replied at last. “If we're going to survive this, if we're going to defeat il Tornja, I need you strong, and I need you sane.”

“And what good,” Nira asked quietly, “did staying sane do me? Hmm? More than a thousand years I didn't touch my well. I could feel it all the time. Right
there
. I wanted it in a way you can't know, worse than any wet bride ever wanted a nimble tongue between her legs, worse than a dying woman wants water.” She shook her head. “Sweet 'Shael, how I wanted it.”

“But you didn't,” Adare breathed, forcing herself to hold that horrible gaze.

“I don't need
you
ta remind me,” the old woman snapped, “what I've done and not done.” For a moment there was something like the old sharpness on her tongue, a hint of the familiar fire in her eyes. Then it went vague and distant all over again. “What good did it do?”

“You saved your brother,” Adare said, pronouncing the words slowly, as though she were speaking to a small child.

“Saved him? Saved him from
what
? For more than a thousand years I watched him, fed him, kept him drugged half to dreamland, kept him from remembering the worst of what we've done, and for what? So I could hand him over to the bastard that broke him.” She gritted her teeth. “I shoulda let him die centuries ago,” Nira growled. “Shoulda dragged a knife across his gristly neck when I still could.”

“He was your brother,” Adare said, uncertain how else to respond.

“All the more reason ta show him mercy.”

“A knife across the throat isn't mercy.”

Nira studied her grimly. “Whatever you think you know about mercy, girl—it's wrong.”

Any other time, Adare would have argued. Now, it hardly seemed to matter. Il Tornja was free, he'd twisted one of the Atmani over to his side, and he had Adare's own son. She could hardly bring herself to think about that last fact, as though if she ignored it long enough it might turn out to be a mistake, some misguided notion rattling about in an ancient woman's addled mind. Only Nira wasn't mad; not yet. There was still too much sense in everything she said. Too much regret.

“And Sanlitun?” Adare asked, the words meek, almost a supplication. “Is he … all right?” She could feel the tears pressing, the rage welling, hot and purple beneath her tongue. “Has il Tornja hurt him?”

The thought of Sanlitun's fear and confusion had gouged at Adare like a knife the entire ride south. He had his wet nurses, but she was the only one who could reliably soothe him, the only one who could drive back the terrors he was too small to articulate. Her disappearance must have seemed like a betrayal, and now Nira was gone, too. Who would comfort him? Who would hold him close and whisper half-remembered lullabies while he fretted himself to sleep? Adare imagined him alone in some cold castle tower, darkness pressing in around him, his tiny fingers opening and closing hopelessly on his blankets, grasping them over and over as though the soft wool could offer any comfort, searching in vain for his mother's face, listening for her voice.…

“The child is fine,” Nira said, her voice cutting through Adare's own waking horror. “More pampered by il Tornja's wet nurse than he ever was by you.”

“But
why
?”

Nira grimaced. “Leverage. Same reason he stopped Oshi from killing me. He needs you. He needs us both.”

“Needs us for
what
?”

“To get to the leach.”

Adare shook her head, furious, baffled. “What leach?”

“The one your brother keeps locked up inside the tower.”

Adare scrambled to think of the girl's name. “Triste?”

She remembered the reports. When Triste first appeared in the Dawn Palace in the middle of a mound of corpses, Adare's spies had tried to learn who she was, where she had come from. There was a swirl of rumors: the girl was Skullsworn, she was an Antheran spy, or an Aedolian-trained leach bound somehow to the new emperor. One witness to the massacre in the Jasmine Court swore that he saw the tattoo of a
leina
around her neck. None of it made any sense. All anyone could say for sure was that she had arrived with Kaden, killed more than a hundred people, then been locked away. Adare shook her head. “What does il Tornja want with Triste?”

“What does he want?” Nira raised her brows. “He wants the little bitch dead.”

Adare stared at the older woman, trying to make sense of what she was hearing. For months she'd been juggling a hundred variables in her mind: the Urghul and the Waist tribes, the Sons of Flame and the Army of the North, il Tornja, and Kaden, and Long Fist. It was like studying a
ko
board as wide as the world itself, armies of thousands and tens of thousands, an empire of millions, the patterns ramifying across oceans and deserts, steppe and forest. In all those twisting lines of attack and retreat, Adare had barely glanced at the tiny stone that was Triste.

“She must be dangerous,” she said slowly.

“'Course she's dangerous,” Nira spat. “'Cording ta your report, took her less than half a morning ta turn your palace into a slaughterhouse.”

Adare took a deep breath, tried to think through it slowly, calmly. “We knew she was a leach, but there are hundreds of leaches in the world. Thousands. Il Tornja isn't trying to kill them all. He must be frightened of Triste.…”